Two Powerful Women Choreographers at Jacob’s Pillow

“Let’s dance.” Before each performance at Jacob’s Pillow, Ella Baff, the festival’s director, welcomes audiences with these words. They are apt. So much of the Pillow’s mission is about inclusion—of many kinds of students in its school, of a range of artists in its programming, and of dancegoers both experienced and novice. Though we may not all be up onstage with the performers, we are witnesses, and thus participants. The festival’s grounds, nestled in the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, encourage contemplation and appreciation; we’re free to wander among the simple wooden buildings, peek into classes and rehearsals, lose ourselves in the archives, watch an outdoor showing by students. But the evening performances are the big draw. A recent visit was a reminder of the Pillow’s generous attitude toward its patrons and its artists, and provided glimpses into the work of two quite different choreographers.

In the Ted Shawn Theatre, the Montreal-based troupe O Vertigo Danse performed its 1999 work “La Vie Qui Bat” (loosely translated as “The Beat of Life”), choreographed by the company’s artistic director, Ginette Laurin, and set to Steve Reich’s iconic 1971 piece “Drumming,” performed live by members of the Societé de la Musique Contemporaine du Québec. In the rustic wood-walled proscenium theatre, with the paintings of Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis watching from the sides of the stage, the crowd was excited, expectant. When the curtains parted, the stage was bare and the lights were low, but a few of the musicians, and their conductor, Walter Boudreau, were visible in the upstage right corner. A lone female dancer, Wen-Shuan Yang, appeared stage right, and one expected Reich’s music to start up immediately and propel her headlong through space. Instead, Yang, in a gray sleeveless top and pants and chunky black shoes, her hair dyed bright red, slowly made her way downstage, lit harshly from above. She gestured simply, dipping her body and smoothing the air with her arms; at the touch of her finger on her head, a ripple ran through her neck and torso and into her legs. The only sound came from the fans whirring above the audience; the only other movement from a fly wheeling woozily above the dancer, picked out by the lights.

Then other dancers entered, the drumming began, and the piece took off. Reich’s composition is a classic of minimalism, but its rhythms are so rich and complex at times as to seem maximalist. Right away, the nine dancers (five women and four men, all dressed in gray, all with the dyed-red hair) responded to the score with powerful dancing whose cadences sometimes matched those of the music and sometimes did not. Partnerships formed and dispersed, always in constant motion. Even on the periphery, where the dancers’ movements were slow and deliberate, the pace was steady. In the center, the dancing had a kind of pedestrian pyrotechnics—movements were big, full of life.

As the piece progressed, the drums—tuned bongos—gave way to marimbas (at one point, the drums dropped out gradually, like eaves dripping ever more slowly after rain), which ceded to glockenspiels (with whistling and piccolo), and then the composition resolved in a glorious combination of all the instruments. Twelve members of the S.M.C.Q. played the score, and were eminently watchable: the musicians’ arms, bent at the elbows, churned like pistons as their mallets hit the marimba bars; the two vocalists stood still, ghostly in the dimness, as they waited for their cue; Boudreau observed the dancers eagerly, looking for a point of synchronization. Through it all, the dancers never wavered in their own rhythms. They were concentrating fiercely (and occasionally giving one another verbal cues), but their performance evinced only subdued satisfaction.

Before “La Vie Qui Bat,” Laurin had never choreographed to an existing piece of music; Boudreau suggested it. To Reich’s insistent composition, she crafted something with its own pulse. Life, Laurin seems to be saying, is unstoppable, our connections come and go, our commitments falter but are eventually repaired. The slow movement on the periphery began to seem like the long view of time, the faster central movement the accumulation of moments. Laurin spread the stage out beautifully, and her partnering phrases had a workmanlike quality—not rough-edged but real. Bodies often ended up cantilevered over laps, arriving there through over-the-shoulder lifts or more nonchalant movements, and the resulting images prompted diverse associations—caregiving, heroism, and, indeed, vertigo, as dancers peered over invisible precipices.

In the Doris Duke Theatre, the Pillow’s more flexible performance space, Jessica Lang Dance presented a program of five works. Lang, a prolific ballet choreographer for other troupes, has had her company for only two years, but in that time she’s created imaginative dances that fall at various points along the ballet-modern spectrum. At the Pillow, she showed pieces danced in pointe shoes, ballet slippers, and bare feet. The first work on her program was a world première, “Within the Space I Hold,” for five dancers, set to a commissioned score by Jakub Ciupinski, which he performed live. With no curtain at the Duke, the piece’s set, by the Vancouver design studio Molo, was visible right away: a conglomeration of undulating low walls, made from accordion-pleated paper, lit from within, with a low opening at the front, like the entrance to a cave.

Ciupinski, with long hair and glasses, stood in the upstage right corner, next to the set. Before him was his instrument, a kind of double theremin, which produced its eerie strains in response to Ciupinski’s movements, and incorporated sounds that the composer had pre-programmed. Two women entered on pointe, in silver and white tights and leotards, carrying enigmatic white objects—treasures of some kind, closely guarded—and advanced, heads down, toward a bright light emanating from the opening in the set. Ciupinski swayed and gestured, as though conducting air. Lang knows how to create a striking atmosphere: one man crawled out of the opening, then another; the women manipulated the objects, which became toroidal tutus.

Electronic blips interfered with the theremin sounds, building this off-kilter landscape further. The dancers moved precisely in Lang’s hybrid modern-ballet choreography, and also interacted with the set, lifting a section of wall and peering through, or snaking a piece of it along the ground. Suddenly, a pair of lower legs appeared in the cave entrance; they rose into the air, slowly, and then angled back toward us, toes pointed, as if their owner were flying away, and hovered there—a wonderful, clever trick. The legs then sank into a deep plié, and the doughnut-shaped tutu reappeared, this time lit like the set. At the end of the piece, the tutu, attached to the crystalline dancer Laura Mead, was the last light to go out. (Almost as fascinating as the dance was the striking of the set, which collapsed into a collection of shallow piles.)

“Within the Space I Hold” was only fifteen minutes long; like all good dances, it left us wanting more. The other pieces that Lang presented were just as brief, but each succeeded in presenting a whole world, fully formed. “A Solo in Nine Parts,” for the entire company, was a Paul Taylor–esque exercise, to Vivaldi, in which group sections gave way to solos for each of the dancers; “Aria” was a calligraphic, soul-baring trio for Mead, Claudia MacPherson, and Kana Kimura, set to music from Handel’s “Radamisto.” In “White,” a “dance on film,” Lang and the artist Shinichi Maruyama spliced together phrases filmed at varying speeds to produce scenes in which languid movement coexisted with hectic pace. Using a more folky, weighted vocabulary, Lang conveyed the poignancy of dance—the heartbreaking desire for moments to stretch for as long as possible.

The evening’s final dance, “i.n.k.” (2011), used video imagery by Maruyama, of drops and splashes of water and paint in slow motion, as a backdrop for an abstract work for seven, in which the dancers, dressed in black, often seemed to be human manifestations of the liquid in the video. The work was anchored by a central duet for Clifton Brown and Kimura, to slow piano, in which gestures accumulated as a relationship deepened. The stage gained stillness, and tension, as video of a single large drop, from the top of the screen, hung tantalizingly before falling and creating an inky crown at the bottom, releasing the dance once again into a more active state.

Lang’s carefully wrought, visually striking dances were the perfect counterpart to Laurin’s meditation on life’s driving force. The two strong female choreographers, of different generations, exemplified the festival’s catholic approach and gave the hungry audiences there more to savor, more to inform their future dancegoing. As the audiences wandered out into the chilly night, the animated discussions were proof that the festival’s mission was succeeding. Jacob’s Pillow runs through August 25th.

Photograph by Karli Cadel/Jacob’s Pillow Dance.

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